MAKER GULLY
One person. Seven products shipped this year across iOS, Android, and web. No team, no funding, no roadmap theater.
That's the premise of this newsletter - and of Maker Gully, the studio I run solo.
Building alone is a strange constraint. There's no one to delegate to, but also no one to slow you down. Every architectural decision is one I'll personally maintain at 2am, so the discipline writes itself: ship what solves the problem, keep it fast, don't add what I'll regret later.
What I've shipped
- Feeder Rater - Snap a photo of your bird-feeder setup and AI scores it across 10 factors with specific fixes. The hard part wasn't the model; it was turning fuzzy output into advice people actually trust.
- FlashDrop - Share photos and files with anyone in the room over Wi-Fi - they scan a QR code with any camera, no app, no cloud, no account. The whole point was removing infrastructure, not adding it.
- Gridlocks, Knit-Knot & Spatial Patch - Three puzzle games, three mental models: merging numbers, sorting yarn by color, rotating shapes into a grid. Each one is an exercise in making "just one more" feel earned, not manipulative.
- Identity Swap - A weekly game: one crisis, three historical leaders, pick who'd handle it best. The challenge was making AI-generated history feel rigorous, not random.
- America 250 History Challenge - A weekly AI-illustrated history quiz: study the image, name the moment. One new puzzle every Monday through July 4, 2027.
What this newsletter is
What I'll write about here: the architecture decisions and their tradeoffs, how I integrate AI without the product becoming a demo, shipping cross-platform as one person, performance, and the occasional honest post-mortem when something doesn't land.
If you're building solo - or thinking about it - this is the conversation I wish I read more of. Subscribe and follow along.
The work: makergully.com